[AccessD] Simple-Talk commentary

Excel is a good database??!?!?! ROTFLMAO!

Access gets a bad rap just like cell phones.

Cell phones are a wonderful invention.  They can be used for all sorts of very handy purposes.  But when put in the hands of a moron, who thinks it's a good idea to text while driving down a highway....  then the cell phone gets the rap, not the idiotic user.

99% of the 'Access sucks' label comes from improper handling from some user.  Here where I work, we use access for all sorts of things.  One highly visible purpose is as a report tool for our production database.  There are a handful of Access .mdb's which are nothing but a reporting front end for the Oracle Backend of our Production database.  These 'reports' and the databases themselves, were created by people that knew about as much about Access as I know about 'string theory', probably less.  So instead of building pass through queries to let Oracle do the work, or better yet, building Views in Oracle to display the data the way they wanted, they build massively convoluted queries, upon queries, that were built on even more convoluted queries.  In the end, for over a decade, the 'reporting' for our Production Database has been labeled as 'Access', or 'Access Reports', and it gets a tremendously bad rap, because of how crappy it was designed in the first place.  

Years ago, to prove my point to someone, I built a properly designed query, that produced the same results as one of these poorly written ones.  The original (and poorly written one) would take ~5 minutes to run.  Mine took a few seconds.  And the reason is, is that Access was literally pulling massive amounts of data across the network, and then doing the work locally, where as my query let Oracle do the work, and the resulting data was then returned to Access.

So for many years, the perception is that Access sucks...when the reality is, the application written IN Access sucks.  Perception rules the day, sadly.  So even though there are well over 20 Access .mdbs, that I built over the last decade, that run or are the data core of network apps, and these run flawlessly and seamlessly with hardly any support necessary (I truly cannot remember the last time I had to fix something that I built in the past, in regards to the .mdb itself....).  So even those these systems work flawlessly, the more visible and poorly designed apps give the perception that Access is a bad system.

This is compounded even more, by the completely misguided perception that most users have, that Access is a system.  Some users realize that Word and Excel are applications, and the documents they create within them are individual files.  So it's not very often that I get a comment that 'Excel is broken', I usually get 'Such and such excel file is having a problem'.  However, Access is viewed as a system, and not an application, like Excel and Word, so it is VERY rare that I ever hear 'Such and such an .mdb or database is having a problem', instead, I typically hear 'Access is broken'.  So the separation between the application, and the .mdb file is virtually nill for a  lot of users.

Access does EXACTLY what it was designed to do.  It was designed as a RAD tool, which is does very well, and as a client side database, which is also does very well.

The other 1% of where Access gets a bad rap, is from Microsoft dropping the ball when it comes to improving Access.  Access 97, IMHO, is one of the best tools of its time!  In fact, if technology isn't 13 years more advanced, and thus putting up a few road blocks as to utilizing Access 97, I'd still be using it today, as often as I used it a decade ago.  Unfortunately, MS had plenty of opportunity to take a wonderful tool, and make it into an even better tool, using current technology.  One great example is security.  When 97 came out, NT 4.0 was in it's infancy, actually, I don't even think it had hit the shelves yet.  But today, Active Directory is a widely used networking tool, and it's security is pretty impressive.  Microsoft could have integrated an NT level security option in Access that would have pushed Access into the 21st century.  Instead, they left Access' security relatively untouched, until 2007, when it ultimately removed the security completely!!!!  What morons!  97's biggest security flaw was that it left the 'key holder' (the .mdw file) out in the open.  With NT security, it moved to a SAM file, and on a domain, that file became a much more secure system, and in current Active Directory structures, the NT structure is virtually impregnable (not saying that NT security is unbreakable, but 2003 made it near impossible for even a decent hacker to break through it....if setup properly).

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2010 4:10 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Simple-Talk commentary

Dear Group,

I receive the Simple-Talk newsletter from Red Gate software.  It's a
SQL Server-boosting publication with lots of good articles sponsored
with ads for Red Gate products.

The editorial content is good, too.  This month's edition (out this
morning) had the following editorial and I thought I'd pass it along.
What do you think about the editor's point that there is no obvious
upgrade path from Access and that it has long out-lived its
usefulness?

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